


the world goes together

by Keturagh



Series: False Fruit [1]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:15:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21933574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: The Dread Wolf wonders,what is death?
Series: False Fruit [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579504
Comments: 1
Kudos: 16





	the world goes together

**“I never looked at you without seeing the sweetness of the way the world goes together, or without sorrow for its spoiling.”**

\---

The Dread Wolf wonders, _what is death?_

The sounds are like rain-patter, the little songs that the woman in the next bed is making. She repeats floods of “dae dae dae” and “ve ve ve” “-laaan,” no longer words but curious noises of language that once sat comfortably on her tongue. And from this thing that he has given her: a new language has been born. A language that belongs to these bodies like clouds - all wrinkles, all palings, all shifting features.

It is her wife in the next bed. The Dread Wolf holds Bayla’s hand, and even in this dream, his agent conjures this vision of her wife in her final season. It is always strange for him to find death in the Fade. The song of death was rare, all but unknown to him before the need for restoration grew too great. Now, memories of death are here in their dreamings — so many of the mages who shape the spirits of the Fade around their memories, shape them on the sight of death.

So many of them are allowed to die in their sleep.

But it is rare for his agents. For those who still seek to shape the image of freedom onto the unchanging realm.

His oldest agent is dying in her sleep, and he is holding her hand at the turn of some tumultuous century, and she will give him one final report before she passes.

But that is not why he has come.

She is tired. He can tell. A grandmother is dying in her sleep, and she wants to imagine her death as if she could die beside her wife; her wife whom she can only conjure, even now, in the long sickness that took first her mind, then her body, and eventually her spirit.

Bayla dreams that she sleeps. And she dreams that her wife speaks in a babble of watery half-sounds.

The Dread Wolf brightens the light, just a little. It could be like a cloud rolling away from the sun behind the window. There is only a single window, with hyacinths in a purple pot.

Of course there is no sun, and no window. No hyacinths, but only the impressions of these things in this realm of the spirit of Fulfillment he has guided to her across the Fade.

Such a rare spirit, Fulfillment. But when he spoke to it softly of all she had done, all her many accomplishments, the spirit had agreed.

It had agreed to shape the Fade around her last memories; to comfort her in her final hour. To fill her final dream with the feelings of praise, finality, and peace that comprised its purpose.

A weak laugh from the woman in the next bed surprises him. The Dread Wolf smiles without thinking, mirroring the sound of quiet joy.

It is easier to think of the woman in the other bed, and of not the woman sleeping quietly in this one.

Bayla is not quiet as she dreams of sleeping - this, her final dream. She was never quiet. Her dreaming had shouted for him across the Fade, all those years ago. For justice. For pride. For a way to punish the world.

He had come to her with wisdom, and she had listened.

She had raised soldiers for the people’s cause. She had maneuvered supplies and intelligence through the cities, through the high houses. She had recruited, first for the sake of one name, and then for the sake of another - but always, always, with the words of power on her lips. _“Rise. Revolt.”_

And when she had grown too powerful alone, she had accepted his caution. He had been able to retire her peacefully, safely. Protecting both the cells she had organized and her own life, in the end.

His thumb drifts across the back of her hand. He is remote, remembering.

He has so much to remember, he who Walks and has had so much time to make so many choices.

She dreams that she wakes.

She is not surprised to see him here, holding her hand.

He thinks, I need to be strong now, and so he gives her a small smile, a small bow.

She does not smile. She raises her chin, returns a stately nod. She has always dreamed her body exactly as, he imagines, it must appear in the unchanging realm. Her hair has grayed. Her neck sways when she looks over at the other bed. Her face collapses into wavering wrinkles when she says, “Oh,” with a small, sad smile.

There is a pot of ointment by the bedside. It was not there when she dreamt she slept. He looks to her, questioning, and she nods. He takes a cream into his palms and spreads it, warms it, and it makes slick noises of eggs sloshing in a bowl.

He places his hands on her left wrist and pushes gently up her arm. He spreads the ointment and is very gentle at first; then, hesitantly, when he realizes she will not break under his touch, he moves with greater purpose and assurance. Her skin shifts beneath his fingers. It is loose. It ripples like the top of a river. He asks, “Are you comfortable?” Because even though he is very familiar with silence, and with this silence, above all others, because when faced with death he has always been at a loss for what to say - even so, Bayla has never been a woman comfortable with silence.

She laughs softly. It is a long time before she says, “Yes, ma fen. It is very nice - it is soothing.”

“Good. That is my intention.” His eyes flick up to her face and he realizes that he has been training his eyes, too intently, on her hand. On her wrist, swollen like an apple. Bruises pellet her forearm, pink and maroon and other shades that make him fear he injures her with every touch.

“Am I hurting you?”

She looks at him. Then, after a nervous squinting of her eyes where she realizes that he has asked her something, she makes a non-committal, “Hm?”

“Am I hurting you?” He repeats, louder, kinder.

“Oh, no,” she says, “Not at all.”

He can only respond with a smile that is not like he is already mourning her. He is not. He is composed.

It is good to feel her hand, like the underside an autumn leaf. It is good to hold her knuckles - still elegant, still delicate, though they are now hard like pebbles. It is good to hear her breathing - though each breath is an open-mouth rasp, and when he looks at her face he realizes that, if he un-focuses his eyes and looks past her, he can lose what makes her face different from any other one of their faces, when this thing he has given to them brings them to their final dream.

“What have you been thinking about?” He asks, too quietly, and must repeat the question.

Her eyebrows tilt together and she leans back, her mouth open, and says, “Oh.”

After a while, he suspects she does not want to speak of this with him. He fills his hands with the ointment once again. The smell is a thing she has made a memory of in the Fade. It is herbal. It is floral. His hands are coated; they cannot absorb any more. The ointment sticks and cracks white and cobwebby in the lines of his hands. It is like paint, he thinks absently. He moves around the bed to her other arm. He caresses the ointment into her elbow. Into the looseness of her muscle underneath her forearm. He carefully covers her wrist.

“Just… my life, my battles,” she says at last.

Her privacy has always been impenetrable to him. He does not know the name of the woman in the next bed. He has respected her too much to ask.

But now it seems the invitation has been made. He filters through the thousand questions racing in his thoughts.

“Were you thinking of your marriage?”

She does not answer. The woman in the other bed has sunk into a peaceful, quiet snoring.

And then she says, “Oh, no. My time at the library.”

He bows his head.

“Did you know, when you sent me there?” she asks.

“Yes,” he answers, honestly, because she deserves this truth in the end.

“Ah,” she breathes. And she shifts her weight in the bed, and the sheets where the outline of her legs should be pull and wrinkle. “Ah, ma fen. You only bit once, after all. I should have listened to ma vhenan.”

He cannot answer her, for nothing she says is untrue.

He reaches out with the power he holds over this dreaming. He touches lightly within her mind, discovers what he is looking for.

Bayla’s wife sits up in the next bed, and she is young, and her black hair is braided, and her eyes are clear and she says to the Dread Wolf, sadly, “You don’t know much, old soldier, do you?” And part of him that he thought could not hurt, is hurt by this even so.

But she stands up all the same, pushing the covers off of her young legs and padding softly across the space between the beds, and the Dread Wolf moves away so that Bayla’s wife can grasp her dying wife’s hand.

“Ma vhenan,” Bayla says, and because it is her dream, her voice does not croak or catch.

“Hush,” says her wife, smoothing the gray hair from her brow.

He leaves, then, because it is right that he go. He leaves them as they kiss, he leaves them as they cling, he leaves them because it is right that he walk away from the two beds, and the spirit of Fulfillment shapes the realm behind him, and he hears it hum its song. He goes out onto the paths, and the song of the spirit follows him for a long, long way:

_This is what is real. This is what was. This was everything, and it was good; and it was good, and it was enough._

_It was enough._

_It was enough._


End file.
